YouTube Files Appeal Against Regulator In Russia Over Content Blocked By New Firewall

YouTube russia screen shotGoogle this week fired off one of the first high profile tests of Russia’s controversial new firewall — erected November 1, 2012 to block child porn, drugs and suicide content; but seen by critics as a route for the government to block whatever else it chooses. Google’s YouTube operation in Russia has filed an appeal against the Russian regulator for blocking YouTube content. The appeal, filed on February 11 by YouTube LLC, concerns the blacklisting of a video that showed how to apply Halloween makeup: because it shows how to make a wound, Roscomnadzor (Russia’s consumer watchdog) also deemed that it encouraged suicide and suicidal tendencies. The video is embedded below.

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Rutube, The YouTube Of Russia, Links Up With Facebook, Gets YouTube, Vimeo Vids In Aggregation Pivot

rutubeA new chapter today for Rutube, the YouTube of Russia: the user-generated video site, long competing against YouTube in its home market and losing, has redesigned and is now turning itself into more of an aggregator that will host content from Google’s video giant as well as Vimeo, as part of a new content injection that will also include full-length feature films. Rutube has also announced an integration with Facebook that will let users watch videos on Rutube that have been shared on the social network. Similar deals with Facebook’s Russian rival, Vkontakte, and Twitter will be following in the autumn.

The moves are part of a new beta version of the site that Rutube, owned by the Russian conglomerate Gazprom, will also include the addition of premium, branded content — a move that it hopes will increase engagement and page views among its 7.1 million unique monthly users, and help it better compete against YouTube, which has 24.9 million uniques, according to comScore.

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More FB IPO Fallout? Russia’s Leading Social Network Vkontakte’s IPO ‘Postponed Indefinitely’

Image1 for post Facebook Investor Bets On Two Horses As Vkontakte.ru Plans To Go GlobalIn the aftermath-analysis about what exactly happened in the Facebook IPO, and what it might mean for the future, here’s one side-effect to the east of Nasdaq: Vkontake, the top social network in Russia, which shares a shareholder with Facebook, Mail.ru, has decided to delay its own IPO.

The news was confirmed by the company’s CEO  Pavel Durov on Twitter. In Russian, he tweeted, in answer to a Russian journalist’s question about the planned IPO date, “It’s not planned. The IPO of Facebook has destroyed the faith of a lot of private investors in social networks and the IPO of VK has now been postponed indefinitely.”

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Yandex.Factory Seed Funding Bears Fruit: SocialMart Launches Social Shopping With Yandex.Market

socialmart logoIt’s not a given that a leader in search can successfully pivot into other areas like social media — just ask Google — but a new service launching in Russia today, from that country’s search leader Yandex, shows one route a company with a lot of smarts can take to make sure they remain a central player in the social game. Today sees the launch of SocialMart, a social shopping startup financed by Yandex (through its seed-funding program Yandex.Factory), and powered by Yandex (via Yandex.Market), but is not Yandex itself.

Both Yandex and SocialMart are banking on the fact that the rising popularity of ecommerce in Russia is inevitably going to cross over with the equally popular trend of social networking: up to now, those twains have not met, unlike in other markets, where services like Mertado (now part of Groupon), Sneakpeeq, and Fab have been running away with the “social shopping” banner, picking up users and funding in the process.

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